Dec 4, 2015
Today marks end of former-Mayor Chuck Reed’s pension reform fiasco. The City of San Jose has now agreed to a settlement of the dispute surrounding Reed’s Measure B with City workers. The agreement covers all but one of the nine non-public safety unions, which represent 3,000 City employees. The terms of the settlement are similar to deal made with the…
Feb 12, 2015
San Jose’s city worker unions are joining together to insist city leaders address the mess that is Measure B and not put it off until 2017, as the Liccardo administration is suggesting. As one union negotiator put it “these groups have no interest in kicking the can down the road and are looking for a public acknowledgement from the city…
Oct 6, 2014
Another blow to Mayor Chuck Reed and City Councilman-Mayor-Wanna-Be Sam Liccardo, with the ruling that the city must pay for the plaintiffs’ attorneys fees in the Measure B lawsuit. City worker unions successfully fought the illegal pension reform measure, spending money and time just to prove what Mayor Reed and his allies knew all along : that their idea to…
Apr 22, 2014
Sometimes politics is described as a pendulum swinging back and forth: one side may be very successful for a while, but eventually political momentum tends to swing back the other way. At the City of San Jose in recent years, the pendulum has swung very far in the pro pension-reform direction. There has been a sense among pension reform advocates…
Jan 24, 2014
Mega Whopper In a recent editorial, the editors of the San Jose Mercury News supported efforts of the San Jose City Council to “tweak” (the Mercury’s term) the provisions regarding disability retirement in Measure B, Chuck Reed’s flawed and failing pension reform initiative. While agreeing that some tweaks needed to be made, and pointing out the Mercury News had in…